I'm not a Mac person (yet, plan to add that to the repertoire this year) but I've been following a lot of the Mac questions on SF. The defaults command comes up a lot and from the context of the questions / answers I get what it does. Just curious, is there a GUI for editing the settings? Seems to me that this would be somewhat analagous to the registry editor in Windows (although I expect that the registry does much more).

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When you execute a defaults write command, it stores the change in ~/Library/Preferences. As an example, the command to change the Dock from the 3D glass look to a more basic 2D shade is:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

What this does is it modifies ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist and changes no-glass to true. The Mac OS X developer utilities contain a program called Property List Editor that will allow you to edit the file with a GUI:

Maybe I read the question wrong. I thought you were looking for a GUI option for changing some hidden options for OS X which are most-likely launched from 'defaults' commands. The above apps allow you to on/off these settings... I believe most of those hidden options are there.
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l0c0b0xMay 19 '09 at 17:13

Mac OS X 10.8 introduced a caching system for app preferences ("cfprefsd"). While this probably increases performances for apps, it makes it harder for developers to manipulate preference values quickly for testing, because making changes directly to the plist files in the ~/Library/Preferences folder does not work any more with editors such as "Property List Editor.app" and the similar one in Xcode. …